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Weekend Herb Blogging #5: Curly Parsley

I'm home from work, it's Friday night, so the weekend has officially begun. The weather in Salt Lake is still pretty good. We had some rain earlier today, but now it's just starting to get dark and still quite warm outside.

This week's featured herb from Kalyn's garden is something I learned to love from my mother - curly parsley. When I was a kid we didn't eat in restaurants often (10 kids in the family, in case you missed that info from earlier posts) but whenever we did my mom would always eat the parsley that the restaurants garnished the plate with. For years I was mildly embarassed when she did it, the way kids who think they know everything are embarrassed about perfectly rational things their parents do, never realizing that when they do finally grow up they will realize they had the most wonderful parents imaginable.

However, one day my mother said, "Taste it," and when I did I was amazed at the flavor. I have loved parsley ever since. As an adult I have learned more about parsley and realized that the plate garnish variety that we had was really not the greatest. In my garden now I have flat and curly parsley both, and although all the master cooks say that flat parsley is best, there are some dishes where I just love the sharp flavor of curly parsley. One of those is Middle Eastern Salad, which I learned to make from my friend Massoud many years ago. It consists of finely chopped tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers, chopped parsley, chopped mint, olive oil, and lemon juice. When it's summer and the tomatoes and cucumbers are garden fresh, there is nothing better than that salad. You will have to come back tomorrow to see my other favorite dish that contains a lot of parsley, at least if you make it correctly and not just the Americanized version.

By the way, that blade like leaf sticking out by this close-up of the parsley is a weed, something I currently have rather a lot of in my garden. I didn't like showing the weed, but I loved the way these close-up parsley leaves looked so much, I just couldn't leave this photo out.

Happy Weekend, and if you want to have fun with Weekend Herb Blogging, send me your link by e-mail, tag your photos "Weekend Herb Blogging" if you use Technorati, then check back on Sunday night to see what kind of herbs, veggies, plants, and flowers people are taking pictures of this weekend.

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One Saturday afternoon I was filled in for my father and took my mother to the opera (I'm not an opera-lover myself) and we stopped into the Falafel House for a bite to eat on the way. The owner has sitting at a back table with a huge bowl filled with parsley that she was running through a Cuisinart to make tabouleh.

Oy, yoh, yoh... What a smell that place had. Hot oil, cigarette smoke, some kind of fresh-bread odor, and the rainey smell fresh parsley pervading everything.

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